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Tampa, Fla., Debate Fact-Check

By The New York Times January 23, 2012 11:29 pmJanuary 23, 2012 11:29 pm

Times reporters take a closer look at some of the statements made by the Republican presidential candidates in Thursday night’s debate.

Santorum and Terri Schiavo

Rick Santorum, a former senator from Pennsylvania, was asked about his involvement in the case of Terri Schiavo, the young Florida woman who suffered brain damage in 1990. After her husband filed a petition to remove her feeding tube, a state court ruled in 2000 that she was in a persistent vegetative state. Her feeding tube was removed but then reinserted after her parents appealed the ruling.

After the tube was removed once again, Congress intervened in 2005, enacting a law allowing for the parents’ case to be heard in federal court.

Tonight, Mr. Santorum said he “didn’t call for Congressional intervention, I called for a judicial hearing” to review a case in which the parents, who were constituents of his from Pennsylvania, and Ms. Schiavo’s husband were on different sides.

Rick Santorum said the rate of illegal immigration in the United States was dropping.

That is correct. Illegal immigration from Mexico and Central America has dropped sharply in recent years.

In 2010, the number of apprehensions by the Border Patrol along the Southwest border dropped to 448,000, the lowest number since 1972, and a decline of 35 percent in the two years since President Obama took office, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

The decline under the Obama administration accelerated a drop in border apprehensions that began under President George W. Bush. Since 2005, apprehensions at the Mexican border are down 61 percent. The apprehensions figure is widely accepted as a rough guide to the number of immigrants crossing illegally.

The Mexican census has reported a sharp drop since 2008 in the number of Mexican migrants leaving Mexico. During the Obama administration, the population of illegal immigrants from Mexico living in the United States has dropped by about 500,000, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.

– Julia Preston

Dodd-Frank and Small Banks

In condemning the new Dodd-Frank law tightening regulation of the financial sector, Mitt Romney cited the law’s negative effect on smaller community banks in particular. But lobbyists won exemptions for community banks from many if not most of the Dodd-Frank limitations on banking. A top lobbyist for the sector publicly described the legislation as beneficial for smaller banks because it leveled the playing field with bigger banks and set a limit on their size.

– Jackie Calmes

American Presence in the Persian Gulf

If there has been one major theme to the foreign-policy debate among the Republican candidates, it has been a race to show who — save for Representative Ron Paul — can get tougher on Iran and its suspected nuclear weapons program.

But it is possible that President Obama already has a tougher plan in place in the Persian Gulf than Mitt Romney is imagining. He said that to counter the Iranian threat, “we ought to have an aircraft carrier in the gulf.”

In fact, White House and Pentagon officials say they keep an average of 1.8 carriers in the gulf at any one time now — that allows one to go off station periodically — and have built up antimissile defenses around Iran.

– David E. Sanger

Size of the U.S. Navy

Mr. Romney repeated a statement he has made before, and it is still wrong, or misleading at best. “Our Navy is now smaller than at any time since 1917,” he said.

Nonpartisan fact checkers at PolitiFact have described the claim as “pants on fire” wrong, calling it “a statement that, despite being close to accurate in its numbers, uses those numbers in service of a ridiculous point.”

In a lengthy explanation, PolitiFact concluded: “A wide range of experts told us it’s wrong to assume that a decline in the number of ships or aircraft automatically means a weaker military. Quite the contrary: The United States is the world’s unquestioned military leader today, not just because of the number of ships and aircraft in its arsenal but also because each is stocked with top-of-the-line technology and highly trained personnel. Thanks to the development of everything from nuclear weapons to drones, comparing today’s military to that of 60 to 100 years ago presents an egregious comparison of apples and oranges.”

Moreover, given the long lead times for major military acquisitions, if the Navy or other military services were woefully small, that development would have begun long before Mr. Obama took office.

– Jackie Calmes

Gingrich as Lobbyist

Chip Litherland for The New York TimesNewt Gingrich responded to a question during the Republican debate in Tampa, Fla.

It is true that Mr. Gingrich never registered as a lobbyist at the federal or state level. But he did many of the same things lobbyists do, including meeting with state lawmakers, members of Congress and federal officials to promote issues important to companies that were paying his consulting firm as much as $200,000 a year.

In at least two states, Georgia and Florida, Mr. Gingrich pitched the services of his clients to legislators who were considering changes to state health care laws. Records from his firm, the Center for Health Transformation, show that he also talked to federal health officials about projects that two of his clients, I.B.M. and HealthTrio, were working on, and he urged members of Congress to approve changes to Medicare that would benefit other companies that were paying him.

His dealings with Novo Nordisk, a drug maker, show how his work could easily be viewed as lobbying. Novo, a Danish company, paid Mr. Gingrich to help expand the market for its diabetes treatments in the United States. A spokesman for the company said Mr. Gingrich did no lobbying, and provided only “guidance and strategic advice.”

But in its annual report to shareholders, Novo Nordisk offered a different take. It listed Mr. Gingrich’s work for the company under the category of public policy activities, noting, “Such activities are often referred to as lobbying.”

– Mike McIntire

Santorum's Loss in 2006

Chip Litherland for The New York TimesRick Santorum responding to a question during the Republican debate.

Mr. Santorum said that when he lost his re-election bid for the Senate from Pennsylvania in 2006 – by 18 percentage points – it was a “meltdown” year for Republicans and that at least he “stood tall for what I believed in.”

It was a bad year for Republicans, but Mr. Santorum omitted at least one factor in his loss that infuriated conservative voters: he had endorsed Senator Arlen Specter, then a Republican, for re-election in the 2004 Republican primary over a conservative, Pat Toomey.

Mr. Santorum has said he supported Mr. Specter because Mr. Specter, who supported abortion rights, had agreed to support President George W. Bush’s nominees to the Supreme Court. Mr. Specter has said there was no such agreement.

– Katharine Q. Seelye

Romney's Inheritance

Mr. Romney said at one point that he and his wife Ann did not inherit their wealth from his parents.

This is not entirely accurate, according to Mr. Romney’s previous remarks on the topic.

In an interview with C-Span in March 2006, Mr. Romney said that upon the death of his father, George, the wealthy former chief executive of American Motors, he received an inheritance. But he quickly donated the money to Brigham Young University, he said. (The younger Mr. Romney and his wife, Ann, attended the college, which is tied to the Mormon Church.)

“I did get a check from my dad when he passed away,” Mr. Romney told Brian Lamb during the interview. “I shouldn’t say a check, but I did inherit some funds from my dad.

“But I turned and gave that away to charity,” Mr. Romney said. “In this case I gave it to a school which Brigham Young University established in his honor, the George W. Romney School of Public Management.”

Mr. Romney continued: “And as an institute of public management, it helps young people learn about government and about serving in public service. And that’s where his inheritance ended up.”

Even so, Mr. Romney benefited heavily from his father’s wealth: he relied on George Romney for a loan that he used to buy his first home, in Belmont, Mass., for $42,000.

– Michael Barbaro

Gingrich on Leaving the House

Mr. Gingrich made it sound as if he left the speakership out of a simple desire to do something else. As Mr. Romney pointed out a moment later, Mr. Gingrich had to resign in disgrace. Mr. Romney was right.

The proximate cause of his departure was that House Republicans, under Mr. Gingrich’s leadership, suffered unexpectedly big losses in the 1998 midterm elections.

But his own conservative troops had turned against him a couple of years earlier, saying that he had gone along with President Bill Clinton in spending too much money and not reining in taxes. Mr. Gingrich’s ouster created chaos in the House and the party.

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